


Beekeeping for City Girls Without Roofs

by newredshoes



Category: Prison Girls - Neko Case (Song)
Genre: Gen, Magical Realism
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2016-12-18
Updated: 2016-12-18
Packaged: 2018-09-09 09:36:38
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,010
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/8885857
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/newredshoes/pseuds/newredshoes
Summary: How's hope feeling today? Tired and sick of this place?





	

**Author's Note:**

  * For [ambyr](https://archiveofourown.org/users/ambyr/gifts).



The RestRite motels have the best blackout curtains. It’s not just those unhemmed sheets of fake velvet, but they’ve also got one layer of navy gauze on each side. It’s thin and a little crinkly if you rub it together, but it lines up somehow to cancel everything out. They’re a perfect migraine hideout, even at the height of day, and I’ll seek out a RestRite for them. I’ve got a membership discount; even the desk attendant seems a little concerned I stay so much.

You don’t find RestRites anywhere but the middle of nowhere. You have to drive on empty two-lane roads for a couple hours, and there’s never any signs to let you know they’re coming. It just swims up off an exit ramp, and you have choose right then to take the turn or keep going. All of them are a little different, little hotels from the ‘60s and ‘70s that got bought up one by one and rebranded. I don’t know how much corporate structure there is these days. I can’t tell if someone paid for these blind spots or if they’re all truly forgotten, but RestRites let me barter or use cash. I’ll put up with a lot for a good day’s sleep.

*

It’s just scrub out there, at this one. I don’t even know what state it is. People care a lot about these things, but I just drive as far and lawfully as I can. There’s satellite radio still, but you need a bank account to pay for a credit card to pay for an account, and I don’t qualify anymore without a lot of paperwork. There’s pirate radio bouncing around the stratosphere; I know there are some who think highly of HAM sets, but it doesn’t replace what they think it does. You can pick up some music stations, though. Carefully curated to stay patriotic.

Look, there’s still some good songs. And since they’re land transmission, you still depend on the tower, and you can still slip between them. There’s that fuzz, a long degradation as you pull harder and harder against the limits of the signal, and then a snap into static as you cross the border. Then you just wait until something else welcomes you in. You just let it happen. You just let it wash over you and come.

*

I wake up in the beehive again. I hope you never know it. You think it’s tinnitus at first, when it first hits you. Then you start to panic, when you realize it’s human voices all around you and no one else admits to them. Then you have to make a choice, one versus the many.

I was a store manager, before. Big box store, strip mall, shells of housing developments. You could get by. Keep your eyes forward, keep your feet warm. Don’t say anything you wouldn’t mind being overheard. I voted when they told us to. I went to parties, I kept myself plain. I thought my deal was sweet.

I don’t know what I did to get stung. I don’t know what made my inner self swell up and get too big. It’s just that one day I was stacking laundry detergent, second shift, and the fluorescent tubes were flickering, and the muzak was at the end of its loop and no one had gone to press play again, and I saw nobody from the top of my ladder, nobody. And I heard a hum that wasn’t lights like I thought, but someone, fully bodied, holding me in her arms.

Good thing I froze. Good thing my eyes went wide and my hand was in place and my red bottle of Tide had only an inch to drop to the shelf. _There’s more, there’s more,_ came this voice inside of me. It wasn’t mine. _You always wanted more._

*

They don’t turn off the hall lights at the RestRite. I could stagger upright, knock over some furnishings and stuff some shirts under the gap in the door, but I just lie there, breathing shallow, trying to settle in the dark. I hear wheels coming over the carpet; a woman pushing a cart passes, slowly. The shadow isn’t slow enough. I smell her smoking. I smell the disinfectant in its bottles and the sweat in her socks.

I know there’s a woman sitting smoking on the edge of her bed in Tacoma. The only light in her eyes is a reflection. She’s too young to know what changed for us all. I don’t talk to the girls I see. This is just a thing that needs to pass; I’m ashamed of the intrusion and afraid of how or why it happens. She’s all business. She’s got company, a side-sleeper whose face I can’t see. I flow into her room like a ghost. I’m static. I’m so far away.

I found RestRite after all this sort of thing kept happening. I thought running as far from people as I could would keep me from floating on the airwaves. Distance just made this thing I do reach farther, get stronger. There’s no message in it for me. It just keeps happening to me. I can’t stop it. I can’t even fight it. I sell things out of my trunk now, jewelry and knockoff perfume and scarves. I don’t have anything to say.

But.

But I remember the news, back before. The photographs of the protesters. The video of the ones who would speak out. They threw around words like “radical” and “resistance,” and I changed the channel. I didn’t think it would do any good.

This girl in Tacoma has a dry-powder look to her. I can walk around her, if I want. Her skin prickles, but she doesn’t move. It’s me that’s cold.

But I kneel in front of her and stroke her chin and her hair. She’s not proud, but she’s capable. “I love you,” I whisper. “I love you.” I’ll say it again until she hears me, until her breath catches, like the click of a dashboard dial.

**Author's Note:**

> Hello hello, Ambyr! I spent two and a half months thinking about your wonderful prompt, and in the end, I have so much more to say about it than actually made it onto the page. I have every hope of really doing it justice once my life slows down a little. Until then, I hope this even remotely suffices -- thank you for loving Neko and her words and her worlds just as much as I do, and happiest to Yuletides to you!


End file.
